"That's how I feel about "irreducible complexity". It will be found to be reducible. Well, maybe, mabye not. Where is it written that talking monkeys should necessarily come to understand the Cosmos in all its glory?"
Actually, Evolution is reducible to a process that could be replicated on a universal computer (a turing machine), and our minds, made of neural nets, can mimic a turing machine program. Therefore, theoretically, given enough time, yes any mind capable of running a turing machine can also run evolution and a good deal more.
-Ben
Re:Oh. My. God.
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
This is a really dumb idea. That energy is already being used by our ecosystem, and energy taken away from this will be directly destroying the environment. I wouldn't even recomend taking the energy away from a desert, much less a woodland. Why use solar energy if you don't get an environmental benefit? Pay the $150 billion and you'll reap a huge profit, if you work it out, I believe it will be substantially less money than goes into fossil fuel research and extraction.
-Ben
The net puts people's ideas on the web.
on
Disinformation.com
·
· Score: 2
But the people are BORING, REPETITIVE, and UNORIGINAL. If you put out 10 million viewpoints, as I've found at slashdot, you'll find two ideas, left and right. Period. No matter the subject or the posters of the subject, you'll find people on the left or right (or some combination thereof). When you repeat the process 10 million times, you'll always find people on the left/right of the graph. How many Abortion viewpoints you gonna listen to before you realize its just a simple trade-off of fetal rights vs. mothers rights? Or Operating systems? Or text editors? Or philosophies?
The problem isn't that the net is boring, or failing to give voice to the 10 million people. The problem is that people are boring, and the thought that if we had 10 million ideas, that one of them would be good enough to compromise on, is ridiculous.
"I had a look at the ingredient list and it contained three "active" ingredients. An Ephedrine derivative (Sudafed anyone?), Caffeine, and a chromium dietary supplement. Considering some of the effects of both Ephedrine and Caffeine, you'd be as well off taking a few cups of coffee. Sure it makes you feel more "alive" or at least awake. Sure if you diet and exercise you will lose weight. But the pills... don't do jack."
Dude, caffeine is totally a weight-reduction treatment option. This will work for weight reduction, but I don't know about the chromium supplement. Of couse, these self-medications probably don't come without the warnings of known side effects of caffein (disruption of sleeping schedules, grogginess, other well-known problems) but caffeine has been used for weight reduction for years. Ephedrine and Chromium are probably extraneous and have their own side effects for much less benefit.
Organics, Health-food supplements, and all have great potential to help people. It's the free-for-all attitude promotes quackary and profiteering far above beneficial effects. Be very skeptical, and watch out; most vitamins and supplements are unnecessary to take (and possibly harmful) if you eat right. And if you eat wrong then vitamins, organics, and all will be of little help.
1. Fuel cell technology won't do much to change our dependance on oil. Oil is the major source of combustable carbon and hydrogen, which are used in Fuel cells.
2. Fuel cells have been off the market because of expense, expense, and expense. Only recently has the price gone down.
3. Greed is good.
4. Isolationism helped cause World War II and the great depression (see the trade barriers put up the week before the market crashed), and kept the United States from interfering in a war which threatened all our allies and ourselves as well.
I will type k with both hands - try it yourself
kkkkkkkkkk
Unlike keyboard typing, you MUST move your hand to do it, and if you do not you will hurt your hand. Also, you may need to hold the phone with one hand and use the other to make a message.
Why not have shifts/control buttons on the back of the phone where one's hand would normally be, so that you could get the same effect by pressing with one of the four fingers holding the phone, while still only needing the thumb to type with?
We already bombed Afghanistan! (Under Clinton after the Embasy Bombings. Bombings which should have been a declaration of war already.)Did it help?
CNN has bitterly deserted and distorted the American perspective. CNN assumes all the people who are not currently in the news are helpless, mindless, easily avoidable individuals. We need to fight a war, and their pussy-footing attitude should not be tolerated.
Remember the spy plane coverage on CNN? Please tell me if I'm wrong, but I got the distinct impression that CNN thought it was a terrible thing that the US could be spying on anyone for any purpose. Tom Clancy said there was an anti-spying bias in the medai on CNN, and the "commentator" said "no there isn't". Well, with a bias like THAT, it's not wonder we were taken by surprise. We need good spying to win this kind of a war.
Turn to fox and abc news for real news coverage. And for G-d's sake, learn from history sometime, CNN!
Training commercial pilots? What is your source for this information?
Osama said he would cause devestation in America in response to America's support of Israel. I take it this support will greatly increase for the time being.
This is a declaration of war. We are at war. As of 4:07 on Tuesday, we don't know who we are at war with. I would venture a guess that an invasion of Afganistan is being considerred, and that Israel will have a temporary Carte Blanche on their actions against the Palestinians.
But we have lost more people to violence (if we lost half the 50,000 people in the WTC) than we have ever lost in a day of American history before (previous civil war record of 22,000). And more than we lost in many other wars as well.
I wonder what affect this will have on the economy and the NYSE...
seven nines is (99.99999) and that makes your calculations 1/100th of what they should be. The final answer should be about 3 seconds/year in uptime.
Uptime of the computer, I suppose, is what this handles, although I don't believe the OS boots in.8 seconds, just the bios. And the server you may want to keep up might not boot in the.8 seconds either.
Plus this doesn't deal with other problems such as why the computer went down in the first place.
That would be a solution, if it was workable. However it is not.
A) All federal agencies make their decisions seperately. The justice department can't make the decision for the other departments.
B) All have programs and procedures for Microsoft Products that lock them in.
C) No clear competitor exists to replace all government programs.
D) Even if successful, this won't affect Microsoft's dominance in home PCs, where you can't even buy a mainstream computer without MS software bundled (even Apple has some bundled!). Let alone convince people against it.
It's like asking the government to fund a competitor to Bell Telephone when they owned vitually all the phones in the US. Not workable.
Is this a precursor to the widely expected split of California into North and South? Where is the boundary between these (soon to be two) states that Dimitry cannot cross?
Props to him on his bold defense of international freedom of speech.
Were you supposed to call the number to get it? I wanted to hopefully get a duel booting computer so I could take full advantage of a DSL connection I'm getting (but I don't want to pay for a full server). I guess I'll just have ME for games and buy a Linux at the store is all.
First is the definition of evolution, all the way up to the definitions of "is".
I say get those fools a dictionary and make them stick to it.
-Ben
I wasn't contesting the facts.
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 2
Facts of the movie are:
1. They were robots from 2000 years into the future, who had inherited the Earth from humans, but humans no longer existed (for one reason or another).
2. This is supposed to be a deep part of the plot, telling us that in the future, robots will be the only things left of human origin on the Earth. And they will look nothing like what we would have built.
But goddamn, they looked like close encounters mixed with ET, acted like them (notice the strange way they "touched" each other like ET) and they were magical (notice how they talked about the psycho-consiousness-space-time sh*t).
Just like ET.
Thus, look like a duck, act like a duck, quack like a duck, and you can call it a robot all you want, but they were aliens indeed.
Because you are a computer scientist, you think David is a "computer" in a robot suit. You also think that David has been "programmed" to fall in love with his "mother" and that "mother" is a variable which can be set at a specific point in the program.
But David is robot, not a computer, and is obviously part evolving hardware. Just like humans and ducks. And just like humans and ducks, they fall in love with a certain thing at a certain time (first living thing after they hatch or person who takes care of them and whose voice they recognize before they are born.) There's no set list of actions which David must do, just a couple guidelines to follow (don't do this, it isn't safe/right/ etc...),and an important point, "Love" is his motivation (computers don't have motivation currently, but could be programmed to have one and to self-evolve to this goal).
David is more like a hard-wired machine in this respect than like a general purpose computer. It's like a continuously re-written imprint, that's evolving as david learns. Which is why David cannot be re-written... without being effectively destroyed. The analogy is to ducks, but there's no reason a robot couldn't be this way. It's just that general purpose computers aren't built that way NOW.
-Ben
I saw the movie too. (spoiler)
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 2
And they were indeed big ETs running around.
The Spielberg ending of the movie was pathetic, and if it weren't specifically explained (in long, boring, overwrought detail) that they weren't magical ET's and were instead magical robots, well then you wouldn't have posted that meager defense of the worst hollywood ending I've seen in a long time. But they were obviosly ET/close encounters of the 3rd kind rip-offs. What does it matter if Spielberg calls them robots??? He could have called them ducks or goats, but THEY WERE ALIEN RIP OFFS!
And the pseudo-psychological-metaphysical-nonsensical bullsh*t where it's explained that a day and/or that sleep has some connection with the universe at a fundamental level... Blah Blah F*cking Blah...
The movie was good, and had a decent ending. I just should have walked out when the aliens showed up.
Microsoft has recently started attacking the GPL and GPL products as being inherantly anti-business. I'd like to know IBM's marketing stance.
Microsoft also seems to be favoring *BSD licences (freely available, but allowed to be modified and resold, for example as OS X, with or without a *BSD license). Were there times when IBM found it preferable to work with GPL-licensed product than with product under a *BSD license? Or is the oposite always the case?
Which is why the unified response of the Free Software/Open Source crowd is so important, and why it is so important to have both GPL and BSD licenses for various things.
They earlier exploited the following schisms
1. Netscape/Mosaic (by embracing and extending Mosaic)
2. AIM/Yahoo (by emphasizing the non-compatabilities)
3. Unix/Apple (by embracing and extending Apple, of course)
In all cases, it goes for the more corporatized version of a product and embraces and extends that. It's a very sound strategy, and we should have spotted it sooner. How should we combat it? Perhaps exposing it as it happens is a good way to start. Expect BSD schmoozing and GPL bashing in the future, and be prepared to stand together where it counts.
Slashdot Mirror
"That's how I feel about "irreducible complexity". It will be found to be reducible. Well, maybe, mabye not. Where is it written that talking monkeys should necessarily come to understand the Cosmos in all its glory?"
Actually, Evolution is reducible to a process that could be replicated on a universal computer (a turing machine), and our minds, made of neural nets, can mimic a turing machine program. Therefore, theoretically, given enough time, yes any mind capable of running a turing machine can also run evolution and a good deal more.
-Ben
This is a really dumb idea. That energy is already being used by our ecosystem, and energy taken away from this will be directly destroying the environment. I wouldn't even recomend taking the energy away from a desert, much less a woodland. Why use solar energy if you don't get an environmental benefit? Pay the $150 billion and you'll reap a huge profit, if you work it out, I believe it will be substantially less money than goes into fossil fuel research and extraction.
-Ben
But the people are BORING, REPETITIVE, and UNORIGINAL. If you put out 10 million viewpoints, as I've found at slashdot, you'll find two ideas, left and right. Period. No matter the subject or the posters of the subject, you'll find people on the left or right (or some combination thereof). When you repeat the process 10 million times, you'll always find people on the left/right of the graph. How many Abortion viewpoints you gonna listen to before you realize its just a simple trade-off of fetal rights vs. mothers rights? Or Operating systems? Or text editors? Or philosophies?
The problem isn't that the net is boring, or failing to give voice to the 10 million people. The problem is that people are boring, and the thought that if we had 10 million ideas, that one of them would be good enough to compromise on, is ridiculous.
-Ben
"I had a look at the ingredient list and it contained three "active" ingredients. An Ephedrine derivative (Sudafed anyone?), Caffeine, and a chromium dietary supplement. Considering some of the effects of both Ephedrine and Caffeine, you'd be as well off taking a few cups of coffee. Sure it makes you feel more "alive" or at least awake. Sure if you diet and exercise you will lose weight. But the pills... don't do jack."
Dude, caffeine is totally a weight-reduction treatment option. This will work for weight reduction, but I don't know about the chromium supplement. Of couse, these self-medications probably don't come without the warnings of known side effects of caffein (disruption of sleeping schedules, grogginess, other well-known problems) but caffeine has been used for weight reduction for years. Ephedrine and Chromium are probably extraneous and have their own side effects for much less benefit.
Organics, Health-food supplements, and all have great potential to help people. It's the free-for-all attitude promotes quackary and profiteering far above beneficial effects. Be very skeptical, and watch out; most vitamins and supplements are unnecessary to take (and possibly harmful) if you eat right. And if you eat wrong then vitamins, organics, and all will be of little help.
-Ben
Use engineering to give venus a large moon.
set it up to rotate close to venus, and farther away over time. This will
1. Strip off most of the atmostphere.
and
2. Cause Venus to rotate.
Two problems solved at once, plus you get very interesting fireworks when you set of the nuclear bombs to move the asteroid.
-Ben
1. Fuel cell technology won't do much to change our dependance on oil. Oil is the major source of combustable carbon and hydrogen, which are used in Fuel cells.
2. Fuel cells have been off the market because of expense, expense, and expense. Only recently has the price gone down.
3. Greed is good.
4. Isolationism helped cause World War II and the great depression (see the trade barriers put up the week before the market crashed), and kept the United States from interfering in a war which threatened all our allies and ourselves as well.
-Ben
The enjoy seemed to be a heavy, but not unmanagable weight:
Weight
Dry weight
City: 31 Kg (68.2 lbs)
Racing: 29 kg (63.8 lbs)
Much lighter than a motorcycle, but about 3 times heavier than a good bicycle. It's too heavy for me to buy it, as I would have to carry it around.
How much did the e-bike weigh? Their website didn't even say, so I guess it weighed too much.
-Ben
It hurts my hand to type this way.
I will type k with both hands - try it yourself
kkkkkkkkkk
Unlike keyboard typing, you MUST move your hand to do it, and if you do not you will hurt your hand. Also, you may need to hold the phone with one hand and use the other to make a message.
Why not have shifts/control buttons on the back of the phone where one's hand would normally be, so that you could get the same effect by pressing with one of the four fingers holding the phone, while still only needing the thumb to type with?
-Ben
And fix the link
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/manet-charter.ht ml
-Ben
2. The same three or four people wrote each of those articles!
3. They also wrote for "Infinite Energy Magazine" http://www.mv.com/ipusers/zeropoint/IEHTML/BACKIS
It is obvious this is still fringe science.
Don't act like it's not.
-Ben
I, too was outraged by the poll
We already bombed Afghanistan! (Under Clinton after the Embasy Bombings. Bombings which should have been a declaration of war already.)Did it help?
CNN has bitterly deserted and distorted the American perspective. CNN assumes all the people who are not currently in the news are helpless, mindless, easily avoidable individuals. We need to fight a war, and their pussy-footing attitude should not be tolerated.
Remember the spy plane coverage on CNN? Please tell me if I'm wrong, but I got the distinct impression that CNN thought it was a terrible thing that the US could be spying on anyone for any purpose. Tom Clancy said there was an anti-spying bias in the medai on CNN, and the "commentator" said "no there isn't". Well, with a bias like THAT, it's not wonder we were taken by surprise. We need good spying to win this kind of a war.
Turn to fox and abc news for real news coverage. And for G-d's sake, learn from history sometime, CNN!
-Ben
Training commercial pilots? What is your source for this information?
Osama said he would cause devestation in America in response to America's support of Israel. I take it this support will greatly increase for the time being.
This is a declaration of war. We are at war. As of 4:07 on Tuesday, we don't know who we are at war with. I would venture a guess that an invasion of Afganistan is being considerred, and that Israel will have a temporary Carte Blanche on their actions against the Palestinians.
But we have lost more people to violence (if we lost half the 50,000 people in the WTC) than we have ever lost in a day of American history before (previous civil war record of 22,000). And more than we lost in many other wars as well.
I wonder what affect this will have on the economy and the NYSE...
-Ben
That's nine nines (99.9999999%)
.8 seconds, just the bios. And the server you may want to keep up might not boot in the .8 seconds either.
seven nines is (99.99999) and that makes your calculations 1/100th of what they should be. The final answer should be about 3 seconds/year in uptime.
Uptime of the computer, I suppose, is what this handles, although I don't believe the OS boots in
Plus this doesn't deal with other problems such as why the computer went down in the first place.
-Ben
Perhaps this explains raves.
-Ben
That would be a solution, if it was workable. However it is not.
A) All federal agencies make their decisions seperately. The justice department can't make the decision for the other departments.
B) All have programs and procedures for Microsoft Products that lock them in.
C) No clear competitor exists to replace all government programs.
D) Even if successful, this won't affect Microsoft's dominance in home PCs, where you can't even buy a mainstream computer without MS software bundled (even Apple has some bundled!). Let alone convince people against it.
It's like asking the government to fund a competitor to Bell Telephone when they owned vitually all the phones in the US. Not workable.
-Ben
Is this a precursor to the widely expected split of California into North and South? Where is the boundary between these (soon to be two) states that Dimitry cannot cross?
Props to him on his bold defense of international freedom of speech.
-Ben
Were you supposed to call the number to get it? I wanted to hopefully get a duel booting computer so I could take full advantage of a DSL connection I'm getting (but I don't want to pay for a full server). I guess I'll just have ME for games and buy a Linux at the store is all.
-Ben
This is getting ridiculous.
First is the definition of evolution, all the way up to the definitions of "is".
I say get those fools a dictionary and make them stick to it.
-Ben
Facts of the movie are:
1. They were robots from 2000 years into the future, who had inherited the Earth from humans, but humans no longer existed (for one reason or another).
2. This is supposed to be a deep part of the plot, telling us that in the future, robots will be the only things left of human origin on the Earth. And they will look nothing like what we would have built.
But goddamn, they looked like close encounters mixed with ET, acted like them (notice the strange way they "touched" each other like ET) and they were magical (notice how they talked about the psycho-consiousness-space-time sh*t).
Just like ET.
Thus, look like a duck, act like a duck, quack like a duck, and you can call it a robot all you want, but they were aliens indeed.
-Ben
Look how much more ire this can raise!
"Microsoft BANS the GPL!"
Now that's journalism.
-Ben
Because you are a computer scientist, you think David is a "computer" in a robot suit. You also think that David has been "programmed" to fall in love with his "mother" and that "mother" is a variable which can be set at a specific point in the program.
,and an important point, "Love" is his motivation (computers don't have motivation currently, but could be programmed to have one and to self-evolve to this goal).
But David is robot, not a computer, and is obviously part evolving hardware. Just like humans and ducks. And just like humans and ducks, they fall in love with a certain thing at a certain time (first living thing after they hatch or person who takes care of them and whose voice they recognize before they are born.) There's no set list of actions which David must do, just a couple guidelines to follow (don't do this, it isn't safe/right/ etc...)
David is more like a hard-wired machine in this respect than like a general purpose computer. It's like a continuously re-written imprint, that's evolving as david learns. Which is why David cannot be re-written... without being effectively destroyed. The analogy is to ducks, but there's no reason a robot couldn't be this way. It's just that general purpose computers aren't built that way NOW.
-Ben
And they were indeed big ETs running around.
The Spielberg ending of the movie was pathetic, and if it weren't specifically explained (in long, boring, overwrought detail) that they weren't magical ET's and were instead magical robots, well then you wouldn't have posted that meager defense of the worst hollywood ending I've seen in a long time. But they were obviosly ET/close encounters of the 3rd kind rip-offs. What does it matter if Spielberg calls them robots??? He could have called them ducks or goats, but THEY WERE ALIEN RIP OFFS!
And the pseudo-psychological-metaphysical-nonsensical bullsh*t where it's explained that a day and/or that sleep has some connection with the universe at a fundamental level... Blah Blah F*cking Blah...
The movie was good, and had a decent ending. I just should have walked out when the aliens showed up.
-Ben
March 16,2001. -Ben
Microsoft has recently started attacking the GPL and GPL products as being inherantly anti-business. I'd like to know IBM's marketing stance.
Microsoft also seems to be favoring *BSD licences (freely available, but allowed to be modified and resold, for example as OS X, with or without a *BSD license). Were there times when IBM found it preferable to work with GPL-licensed product than with product under a *BSD license? Or is the oposite always the case?
-Ben
Which is why the unified response of the Free Software/Open Source crowd is so important, and why it is so important to have both GPL and BSD licenses for various things.
They earlier exploited the following schisms
1. Netscape/Mosaic (by embracing and extending Mosaic)
2. AIM/Yahoo (by emphasizing the non-compatabilities)
3. Unix/Apple (by embracing and extending Apple, of course)
In all cases, it goes for the more corporatized version of a product and embraces and extends that. It's a very sound strategy, and we should have spotted it sooner. How should we combat it? Perhaps exposing it as it happens is a good way to start. Expect BSD schmoozing and GPL bashing in the future, and be prepared to stand together where it counts.
-Ben